In a remote desktop technology based on a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), a virtual desktop of a server may be remotely controlled using a local client, so as to perform operations such as remote screen display, remote sound transmission, and pluggable hardware mapping. When a multimedia file, such as a video file (video data of the video file may include various types of multimedia data such as a text, audio, visual media, and an animation), is played using the remote virtual desktop, the server usually performs software decoding on the video data using a central processing unit (CPU), transfers decoded video data to a display driver, and subsequently sends the decoded video data to the client for display. For the foregoing process, refer to FIG. 1. A desktop protocol serving end of the server organizes a network packet according to a desktop protocol, and sends the decoded video data to a desktop protocol client. In this way, because software decoding needs to be performed on the video data using the CPU of the server, usage of resources, such as the CPU and a memory of the server, is relatively high.
In the prior art, when a client based on a Windows® operating system sends a hardware decoding capability in a Microsoft® video hardware acceleration (DirectX Video Acceleration, DXVA) specification to a server based on a Windows operating system, the server may use the hardware decoding capability as a hardware decoding capability of the server. Because the client has the hardware decoding capability, the server may not perform software decoding on the video data using the CPU. Instead, the server may intercept the non-decoded video data using a Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM), and send the non-decoded video data to the desktop protocol client using the desktop protocol serving end for hardware decoding and display, so as to implement redirection of the video data. For this process, refer to FIG. 2. The redirection herein is that the server sends the non-decoded video data to the client for decoding and video playing. However, a redirection solution in the prior art is applicable only to a client based on a Windows operating system, but is not applicable to a client based on a non-Windows operating system such as Linux®, Android®, or iOS®.